Safety Features

Safety in handling blood samples is fundamental to Bactest technology.

The rapid and explosive rise in the number of HIV infected people world-wide raises many laboratory issues but the importance of safety whilst handling, sampling and analyzing blood (which is always considered dangerous and potentially virally infected), are paramount.

Safety issues are poorly addressed in many current systems and the failure of an infected blood culture, often presented in the form of a fragile glass bottle under pressure, within a large, expensive instrument presents severe financial and technical considerations.

The safety implications of the failure of an infected blood culture to the operators and laboratory staff are enormous and commercial systems do not currently address operator safety as a primary function of the system.

Manual tests are crude and do not address technical and safety considerations that the market demands.

Bactest has included a substantial range of containment barriers and safety features within the core technology (and associated products) reflecting the dangers associated with handling high-risk samples such as Human Blood (potentially HIV infected) or culturing microbial pathogens from a range of clinical or non-clinical sources.

Benefits accruing from these features are:

  • Improved safety for operators and associated scientists and staff
  • Improved H&S procedural simplicity
  • Reduced risk of litigation

The rapid and devastating rise in HIV / AIDS has created a huge strain on heathcare structures across the globe. Countries least able to bear the brunt are those most affected.

Many healthcare workers are infected and perish through contact with contaminated blood samples and the lack of suitable safety barriers, seriously undermining healthcare development.



Needlestick accidents occur when healthcare workers jab themselves or a colleague with a needle, or other sharp medical device, which is contaminated with potentially infected blood.

Second only to back-injuries as a cause of occupational injury amongst NHS workers, an ongoing RCN surveillance project suggests that as many as 100,000 needlestick accidents occur in the UK every year.
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